Great players don't necessarily make for great GMs. They don't necessarily make for just good ones, either. Does he have any kind of front office experience?

I'm sure all Lakers fans are excited about bringing a hometown hero in to run the organization, but if he has no experience running or managing a team, why will he all of a sudden know how to do it when he's handed the keys to one of the most prominent, if not the most prominent franchises in the league?

I'm not definitively saying he's going to suck or that he won't do well. Just thought it was an interesting pick considering he has no experience in an NBA front office. Granted, whatever the Lakers are doing now hasn't been working and they may need a fresh start, but I just won't be surprised if they continue to flounder.

Devil's advocate to the whole "former players can't do it" groupthink but Jerry West has done alright for himself as a GM. Larry Bird also hasn't been terrible. If Lebron wasn't around that Pacers team would've at least made a Finals.

In the lead up to this Magic talked about having a GM handle the hands-on contract/trade work. That structure could work.

Magic also knows just about everyone in the league well through his playing and analyst days. Will be interesting to see how he taps that network (he alluded to calling around for advice within the last month) to his advantage or disadvantage.

Who knows how Magic will do (cannot do any worse than Buss/Kupchak) but getting marquee free agents will make or break him. 3 of the big 4 clippers are free agents this year. I wonder, if they had gotten Chris Paul, would they even be in this mess.....

Sparty connection aside, I love Magic Johnson. I think he was an amazing athlete and had been an even better executive and social ambassador in the past 25 years. Although I don't like the Lakers, I wish him all the success in the world (until they play the Warriors!).

For those you not yet familiar with working with a consultant as Magic was let me give you some advice from years of experience. Once your company brings one in and they are evaluating you - get your resume buffed up cause you're gonna need it. SOON.

There hasnt been one consultant engagement in the history of corporate America that didnt end with the following summary report:

1. Your company is an utter disaster. It's as screwed up as anything we've ever seen. It's a wonder you guys can still make payroll.

2. The guy in charge of the department you asked us to review? Why that's the the most screwed up employee in a sea of screwed up employee. X means well and is a nice guy and all but MAN is he over his head and holding you guys back.

3. As luck would have it, our firm (or in the case of Magic-himself) just so happens to have the precise skillsets you need to extrecate yourself from the craphole you find yourself in. For the mere sum of (about double whatever the company was paying the guy they're about to get murdered) we can pull you out of the ditch. It wont be easy and it will take a long time but with perserverance (and about 5 times what you would've paid somebody internally) we can do it!

I knew those dudes were toast the miniute they announced they had brought Magic in as a consultant to review their basketball operations.

As you can imagine, I have a LOT of things I think I think about this.

Point the first - MGrowOld is 100% spot-on about how consultants roll, though anyone who's watched Office Space won't be surprised by this. My current firm was much smaller 6 years ago and "business consultants" would walk in the door unannounced all the time to do a cold pitch to my boss on how he could grow the firm. My boss may drink too much coffee and may have the attention span of a headless lemur but he's the fundamentally most savvy, decent & fair guy I've ever worked for so he noped the fuck outta those asswipe charlatans with a quickness.

Point the second - did Jim Buss/Mitch Kupchak deserve to get fired? A lot things happened to put the Lakers in their current dire straits. Many of them were out of the front office's control - most notably the 'basketball reasons' CP3 trade, which is why David Stern and Cavs* owner Dan Gilbert (* - sorry, MGrow and other Cavs fans) can rot in the same trailer-trash circle of hell alongside the Boren family. There were many other missteps - Deng and Mosgovs' contracts, hiring Mike Brown - that can only be laid at the feet of the front office. On the other hand, Mitch and Jim Buss did some good things that deserve recognition - Kupchak engineering the Gasol trade gave us two titles and although he's a sad punchline now, Buss picking Andrew Bynum also played a role there. And we unloaded dross for dross when we traded him for D12 so that's a wash. However the record is mixed and the team is years away from contending. I would argue that the aborted CP3 trade was the single biggest culprit and David Stern bears the lion's share of the responsibility in throwing the Lakers under the bus(s) However, our front office did not make enough right moves to get out from under the bus. David Stern cannot be fired from the Laker organization, however Buss-chak could, and were. C'est la vie.

Point the third - is Magic the right guy for the job? Here's why he is: If you were going to craft a resume for running a team that didn't include 'running a team' his is as good as anyone else's. His business mentor was Dr. Jerry Buss who is arguably the greatest team owner in history and his own track record as a business CEO is excellent. He's at least in the top 10 percentile of business savvy people in the country and as far as basketball IQ he is in the top 10 of people who ever lived. I'm not going to hold his disastrous stints as talk show host or Laker coach against him, because a) those are not what he's doing now and b) it's OK to fail and most successful business people would tell you it's essential to do so. And his stint with the Dodgers was encouraging, they did pretty well with him as part of the braintrust. To the extent that you need to build relationships to lure in top talent, Magic should be terrific. Everybody - even Celtic fans - likes Magic. So he has the tools and the smarts to maybe to a good job and he's been saying the right things, except when he hasn't. Which brings us to....

Point the third-and-half - Here's why he isn't: My main concern is that the story has, and continues to be, Magic as a player in the ongoing Buss vs Buss drama. If you look at the best team owners - Micky Arison of the Heat, Dr Jerry Buss, Peter Holt of the Spurs, Mike Ilitch (RIP), the Rooney family, etc - they tended to be very good at getting out of the way and not being the story. Magic isn't like that - he has an ego. Granted, he *should* have an ego but his outsized personality is, to me, not conducive to having a drama-free tenure as team-runner.

Moreover, the ongoing perception that Jim & Jeanie Buss aren't on the same page is a problem 100% of their making and they're both at fault here (Jim Buss can be forgiven for not wanting his sister's ex-fiance around - I love the guy for the five titles but Phil Jackson is caustic, passive-aggressive asshole) and Magic's didn't help by throwing gasoline on that tire fire with his very blunt Twitter shots at Jim Buss. The optics, as they say, were bad.

Point the fourth: Where do we go from here? Crossing our fingers once again. I'm very leery of change for its own sake. The first thing male lions do when they take over a pride is kill all the cubs so they can sire their own cubs on the females. So it is an ingrained tendency to clean house but all things in moderation. In fact the most alarming thing Jim Buss did when he took over the franchise from his father was to fire all the long-time Laker employees like Ronnie Lester, their head scout, and a whole slew of other people. Again this will sound quite familiar to other MGoReaders. Still, it is what it is. And the biggest problem the team had that no one talked about was the cloud of uncertainly as to which Buss child was calling the shots. It wasn't solved to anyone's satisfaction but the hope here is that the coup, while bloody, is finally over and we can move on.

Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, and LeBron James can all trade with each other and compete with each other is crazy. 4 of the best players in NBA history basically with complete autonomy over their organizations.

As a lifelong Lakers fan, this is a great move by Jeanie Buss. She held her brother accountable for his failures in the front office, which signals to free agents around the league that the Lakers are serious about improvement.

While Magic Johnson may not have any experience running a basketball organization, he brings instant credibility in the area that matters the most for big market teams.........free agency. When the Lakers have free agency negotiations/talks this summer, we no longer have a horse jockey attempting to persuade impact players. Instead, we have arguably the greatest basketball player to ever live leading the talks, and Magic's name certainly carries a tremendous amount of weight.